Stuart Barnes

Stuart Barnes lives in Melbourne, Australia, where he writes & edits PASH capsule, a journal of contemporary love poetry. Poems are forthcoming in Southerly, blackmail press, sacred / profane, Mascara Literary Review, &Assaracus: A Journal of Gay Poetry.

The Secret History,

your prized

thyrsus,

soon became mine

(no other could’ve prised my twenty-first

fist).

fist). In a leather bar

that Frenchman’s

spiteful

spiteful telling,

then the laughter—

The Bacchic shout^† awoke

A shoot entwined your throat

Quickly

I grasped some antiquity’s

safer

veiled.

                      †… I have chosen Thebes as the first place

To raise my Bacchic shout, and clothe all who respond

In fawnskin habits, and put my thyrsus in their hands –

The weapon wreathed with ivy-shoots –

—Euripides, The Bacchae, translated by Philip Vellacott, Penguin Books, 1973